this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I believe that this is not the answer to dark matter, but rather "We knew how much of the universe was made up of baryonic (normal) matter, and we guessed it was intergalactic gas, and now we have measured that."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yep, this is specifically about the "missing baryon problem" - we've finally confirmed where the normal matter is hiding (mostly in filaments of hot gas between galaxies), but dark matter is still a completely seperate mystery that makes up ~27% of the universe and we still have no idea what it is lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

So, space clouds?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Decades ago, astronomers estimated that “ordinary” matter (basically everything that isn’t dark matter or dark energy) makes up 5% of the universe. There was just one problem—they had no idea where most of it was.

For anyone like me who's brain went immediately to dark matter after reading the headline, it's related but not the dark matter itself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago